Twisted Hills (3 page)

“Glad to see you're feeling better, Preston,” he said.

“I'm glad . . . that you're glad,” Kelso grumbled sourly, lowering the canteen with Hazerat's help. Water ran down his blood-caked chin and dripped red-black down his chest. “Now, give me . . . a gun,” he demanded, snapping his weak fingers toward Hazerat.

“Wait!” said Charlie, seeing his brother obediently lift a spare Colt from behind his gun belt. But it was too late. Hazerat handed the Colt to Kelso, who took it and let the weight of it pull his hand down into his lap. His hand stayed around the gun butt; his thumb lay deftly over the hammer.

“Wait . . . for what?” said Kelso, his voice still weak but sounding stronger. He leered at Charlie. “If the 'paches show up again . . . you need all the guns . . . you've got.”

Charlie looked at the gun in his lap, unsure if Kelso could raise and fire it, but not wanting to find out on himself.

“You're right, Preston,” he said. “I was just thinking, in your shape and all . . .”

“Let's get this straight,” said Kelso. He wiped his wrist across his mouth, wincing at the pain in his cracked lips. “What you want . . . is the money I hid. That's all that's . . . standing between me and the end of your gun barrel.”

“Preston, I don't know how you can say—”

Kelso cut his protest short. “Because that's what I'd be thinking . . . were it the other way around,” he said. He looked up at Hazerat. “Ain't that so, Hazerat?” he asked.

“I can't say we haven't thought about the money—” Hazerat started.

“Hell yes, it's so,” the wounded, scalped gunman answered for him, cutting him off. Kelso struggled to his feet and stood shakily. But he managed to raise the Colt in his right hand and wave it back forth menacingly. “Get me to Agua Fría . . . ,” he said in a strained voice. “If I live . . . I'll split the money with yas. If I die . . . you get nothing.”

The Hookes looked at each other.

“How do we know we can trust you?” Charlie asked flatly.

“You don't,” Kelso replied. “But it's the only hand you're holding.”

“What about Segert?” Hazerat said. “Is he going to stand for you sharing money that's partly his?”

“He's got no choice,” said Kelso. He coughed as he spoke and had to sit back down. A thin trickle of fresh red blood seeped down from around an arrow stub. “Especially when you . . . both tell him you saw those thieving 'paches ride off with the money. . . .” His words ended in a deep pained-racked cough.

“We didn't see them do that,” said Hazerat with a puzzled look.

Kelso rolled his eyes from Hazerat to Charlie. “Is he always like this?” he said, wheezing, but with his thumb still over the gun hammer.

Hazerat looked more puzzled. “Like what? All's I said is we didn't see—”

“Shut up, Hazerat,” Charlie said. “We both saw them take off with the money—saw them clear as day.” He stared steadily at Hazerat; so did Kelso, even as he coughed and wiped blood from his lips.

“Aw, yeah, that's right. We did,” Hazerat said, finally getting it. A grin lit his face. “Them damn thieving 'paches,” he said for the second time.

Ranger Barracks, Nogales Badlands Outpost

A week had passed since the Ranger had arrived at the Badlands Outpost. Now it was time to get back on the trail. He had spoken with his Captain, Morgan Yates, about Agua Fría, and wasn't surprised to hear that the Mexican government was as curious as the Rangers about the place. Captain Yates was aware of the recent upsurge of American thieves and killers taking refuge there. The local law, the
rurales,
had caved in to outlaw leaders, either by use of intimidation or by the weight of the U.S. dollar.
Yes,
Captain Yates had agreed, it was time to send someone in, see what was going on there. . . .

In the dim light of an oil lantern, Sam took off his boots, his riding duster and his silver-gray sombrero. He placed the items inside a wooden storage locker and pulled out a set of clothes that had been stored there for over a year waiting to be used should the proper occasion arise.

And now that occasion is at hand,
he told himself, closely inspecting the clothes, the boots, in the dim circle of lantern light.

He put on a dark gray shirt that unlike his own shirt bore no pinholes or the faded imprint of his six-pointed badge, which he'd removed from his old shirt and shoved down into his trouser pocket for the time being. The collarless shirt had been boiled free of a wide bloodstain and its bullet hole darned flawlessly. Over the clean shirt, he put on a California-style three-button tan corduroy coat with weathered dark leather trim around the sleeves and lapel.

He buttoned the upper two buttons of the coat and left the lower one open to accommodate his sidearms and afford him more comfort in the saddle. He replaced his sombrero with a wide flat-brimmed range hat that lay on a wooden bench beside him. Sitting, he exchanged his calf-high boots for a pair of taller Spanish boots with Chihuahua seven rowel spurs attached to them. Worn silver-tooled conchos adorned the leather spur straps.

Stylish . . .

He crossed a boot atop his knee, flipped the spur with his finger and watched the rowels spin.

Maybe
too
stylish for his taste, he thought. But then he reminded himself that for this job he wasn't Ranger Sam Burrack, he was another man altogether—the kind of man who wore an extra cross-draw holster and liked silver conchos on his spurs.

A gunman bandito, a desperado. . . .
He gave a slight chuff at the irony of it.
You, of all people . . . ,
a voice chided inside him.

He stood up. Through an open rear window he saw the big restless dun he'd chosen from the livery corral. The dun stood in the pale moonlight hitched to a post in the alley behind the barracks, trail-ready and waiting for him. He saw it lift its muzzle, probe the hot dusty air and shake out its mane as if in anticipation. He'd chosen the big dun for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that the horse bore no brand, no markings of any kind—perfect for working undercover, he'd told himself.

Undercover . . .

He looked out at the dun, then at the flat-brimmed range hat. He didn't like working without a badge. There was an element of deception to it that ran against the grain of his nature. He had tried to live his life in a straightforward manner, open and honest to a fault. He preferred walking up to a man, identifying himself, and telling the man flat-out what he was accused of and what was about to happen to him. “Make your choice,” he would say with calm finality. And so it would go. That was the way he saw the law to be best served.

As a rule, he usually carried a list of names of the men he hunted. Once he found them, he gave them a choice. They could lay down their weapons and turn themselves in, or they could buck the odds at killing him and once more staying a few steps ahead of the law. These were tough, wild, desperate men, who for the most part liked their odds at killing him. But so far he'd always managed to kill them first. As he thought about it, he pictured their faces staring up at the sky, their boot soles exposed to him as he walked forward, his Colt smoking in his hand.

He kept no running count of how many men he'd arrested as opposed to how many he'd left lying dead in the street; he marked their names off his list and moved on to the next one. It couldn't get more honest and simple than that. Yet he knew there were times when undercover work had to be done, and like all Territory Rangers he did whatever the particulars of a certain job called for to the best of his ability. He picked up his plain leather gun belt and looked it over.

In this case the job involved taking off the badge and putting on a whole other identity. There was trouble a-brewing in Agua Fría. Curtis Rudabell couldn't have made it any plainer. “It's my kind of people running Agua Fría,” he'd said.

So be it,
Sam told himself. He swung the two-inch-wide gun belt around his waist, buckled it, adjusted it and picked up a second ivory-handled Colt and slid it down butt forward into a cross-draw holster he'd added onto the left side of his gun belt. He tied the right holster down to his thigh, straightened and stamped the big boots down firmer onto his feet. It wasn't the first time he'd worked undercover; it wouldn't be his last.

He reached down to the glowing lantern and trimmed the wick low. He had measured enough fuel to keep the lantern burning for as long as an hour after he left, rather than have anyone see the lantern light go out all at once. This was how a man covered for himself when he wanted his comings and goings to be obscure.
Get used to it,
he reminded himself.

In the dimmer shadowy light he picked up a set of saddlebags sitting on the floor at his feet and swung them up over his shoulder. He picked up his Winchester repeating rifle, which was leaning against the wall and walked out the open back door and stepped down to the post where the big dun stood staring at him in the pale purple darkness. The horse stamped a restless hoof and shook out its mane.

“I expect you're ready to go?” the Ranger asked quietly, swinging the saddlebags from his shoulder onto the dun's back. He tied the bags down behind a California-style saddle he'd taken from the livery tack room. As if in reply to him, the dun jerked its head against its tied reins. The Ranger shoved his rifle down into the saddle boot, untied the reins and swung up atop the dun.

Slipping out of town like a thief in the night,
he told himself, backing the restless animal onto the narrow alleyway.

He turned the animal toward the black shadows of a backstreet that would lead him to the border trail. For a moment he stared out through a gray-red haze of dust looming in the distance between the earth and the starlit sky. Taking a breath as if to settle himself for what lay ahead, he touched his boots to the dun's sides.

“Let's be off, then,” he said quietly, feeling the horse jerk forward beneath him and down along the alleyway into a long gantlet of greater darkness. “We've got a long ride ahead of us.”

The dun carried him forward at an easy gallop, the sound of its hooves falling flat and muffled in the dirt behind them. In the blind darkness the Ranger had no sighted path to follow, only a narrow slice of purple sky carved along the upper edges of rooflines above the blackness surrounding him and the horse. At the end of that corridor of purple sky, a three-quarter moon lay silver-white amid a thin veil of passing cloud. The Ranger rode into the moon until the blacker shadows fell behind him and the distant hills of Mexico stood up slowly like great beings arisen from sleep.

When he reined left onto the trail toward the border, the Ranger let the reins slacken in his hand; and he let the dun set its own pace in the soft cooling night, liking the feel of the horse's strong, easy gait. When the lingering howl of a wolf resounded off in the night, the Ranger noted the horse's senses quicken, yet he felt no fear, no hesitation, no break in the rise and fall of hooves.

“We're going to get along just fine,” he said down to the dun, patting a gloved hand on the horse's withers. He upped the horse's pace with a touch of his bootheels. And they rode on.

•   •   •

Twice in the night the Ranger had stopped along the rocky border trail. During his first stop, he had rested and watered the dun at a narrow stream of runoff water snaking down from a stone basin seated atop a low hillside. Approaching the runoff, Sam had seen red eyes rise from a black starlit mirror of water and level at him, unblinking, from the other side of the stream. Then he'd seen the eyes vanish in the darkness as the dun rode closer.

When he'd finished watering and resting himself and the dun, he'd ridden on, looking back at length and seeing the red eyes reappear in his wake. He did not stop again until the first streak of silver-gold morning light mantled the far horizon.

Atop a low rise of sand and layered stone, he spotted deep wheel tracks of a wagon that had swung up from the floor sometime in the night and rolled along the cusp of a low-sloping hillside. He noted that the hooves of only one horse lay between the wheel tracks, and these hooves were to the wagon's left—the sign that one horse had been put upon to pull a two-horse rig.

A heavily loaded wagon at that,
he further noted, judging the depth of the wheel tracks.

He stepped down from the California saddle and walked along between the wagon tracks, leading the dun for the next half hour as morning swelled above the distant edge of the earth behind him. He had no doubt that the wagon would come into sight, and when it did, he saw it now sat farther back down the sandy hillside, tipped dangerously to one side.

A peddler's wagon, he decided, looking closer in the thin morning light. A single gaunt, white-faced roan stood to one side, its muzzle down, probing in vain for any trace of graze in the rocky sand.

When Sam was within thirty feet of the wagon, he stopped again and stared at the blackness of an open rear door.

“
Hola
the wagon,” he called out, reminding himself right away that he was not Arizona Territory Ranger Sam Burrack. He was only one more lone rider—some gunman risen from the black desert night.

“Do not come any closer,” a woman's voice called out from the black open door. “I am not alone here.”

Sam caught the slightest accent in her voice and tried to identify it. Romanian? Polish? Russian? He didn't know. But he did know she was alone. Of course she was alone, he thought. Why else would she even mention it?

His first impulse was to ask her if something was wrong, if she needed his help. But he reminded himself again that he was not the Ranger. He was a man who couldn't care less what happened to anybody except himself out on this desert crossing. As much as he disliked doing it, he took a breath and looked back and forth.

“Suit yourself,” he called out to the open door.

He gave a tug on the reins in his hand and started forward, the dun plodding right behind him. Veering slightly, he started walking wide of the wagon and its gaunt roan. As he drew diagonally closer, he saw the horse lift its sand-crusted muzzle and stare toward him and the dun. He saw hunger in the horse's dark eyes.

“Wait,” the woman's voice called out to him before he got past the wagon, the gaunt roan.

All right . . .

The Ranger stopped, almost relieved. He still didn't speak; he only stood watching as a dark-haired young woman stepped down from inside the wagon and stood staring at him, her right hand pressed close to her long gingham skirt. Sam had seen this position enough to know that she held something there, a revolver, a short shotgun, some sort of weapon.

“We—” She halted and corrected herself. “That is,
I
cannot move my wagon down the hillside. It has started to tip. It will fall over,” she said, sounding both embarrassed and worried. “Can you please help us,
por favor,
mister
—señor
?”

Sam heard her stiff clumsy attempt at Spanish.

“I'm not Mexican,” he said. “I speak English.” He kept his voice firm but not unfriendly.

“Oh, I see,” the woman said.

Again, the trace of an accent—ever so slight. She kept her hand pressed against her skirt, watching as Sam stepped forward toward her.

He looked her up and down, then shifted his gaze to the side of the wagon as he walked closer. Weathered remnants of unreadable letters adorned its side.

“What's wrong with the wagon?” he asked.

“We—I mean,
I
started back down to the trail, but I turned too much at once and the wagon started tipping. Now I cannot move it in any way that does not make it tip even worse. Can you help me?”

Sam looked the wagon over and only nodded as he walked. He could see that his walking closer made her uncomfortable. Yet he didn't stop until he stood ten feet away.

“First thing, let's make clear if you're a
We
or an
I
,” he said flatly. “I like knowing how many people I'm talking to.”

“I am not alone. My father is inside,” she said. She looked frightened and took an instinctive step backward toward the rear wagon door.

“I will not be taken advantage of,” she said, her voice turning shaky. “I warn you.”

Sam looked at the wagon door, not believing her.

“Father or not, if I was going to take advantage of you, we wouldn't be talking right now,” he said, giving his tone a hard edge. He stepped past her and alongside the tilted wagon, inspecting it. Whatever she had pressed to her skirt, it wasn't a gun, he figured, or else she would have raised it toward him along with her warning.

“Oh,” she said, seeming to understand his logic. She followed along behind him and the dun, her first few steps reluctant, then becoming less so as she spoke. “I have been told many bad things about those who ride this desert crossing.”

“Is that a fact?” Sam said, tossing the matter aside as he looked at the dangerously leaning peddler's wagon. “If that's a pigsticker you're holding, you need to put it away. It'll take the three of us to straighten this rig.”